iMac users with Firewire - Step inside - need a solution

So, in the last 24 hours I've lost 3 terabytes on two drives that were inside a OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro. I have this connected via Firewire 800.

I'd boot the Mac and the AL Pro would "click" at boot but the drives would never mount.

I thought perhaps it was the drives themselves so I ended up buying a new 3TB mechanism last night and formatted it inside the Elite-AL Pro and ended up copying a lot of the remaining data I had to the new mechanism. Everything seemed fine.

This afternoon I got home and the the drive wouldn't mount and indeed I managed to find out from Drive Genius that the drive was failing and recommended to back everything up before the drive failed altogether! It hadn't even been installed for 24 hours!

I shut everything down and placed the new drive in a USB drive case I already had and it pretty much was unreadable. Sigh. All that data gone in a flash.

I was able to format it but it went from over 2 TB to 800 gigabytes of available storage - that's not good - I shut everything down again and returned the drive because the AL-Pro seems to be killing drives.

So I have a Corei7 iMac but my storage solutions are USB2 and Firewire 800 or Ethernet. That's it. If I get rid of this Mac altogether I could concievably go thunderbolt but that involves a large cash outlay I'm not prepared to make at this time.

I'm still bummed out my old G5 tower died otherwise I would have found a way to use that as a drive storage case but I'm having terrible luck with mass storage.

Anyone want to recommend drive cases that actually work over time?